John Milton and the politics of slavery

Abstract

The argument takes as its point of departure a number of recent studies of the ideologies employed to legitimize the decision by the English Parliament to go to war in 1642. The focus of such studies has generally been on common law theories about the relations between law, prerogative, and the liberty of subjects. As a result, they have arguably paid too little attention to the role played by classical ‐ and especially Roman law — ideas about freedom and unfreedom in the attack on the Stuart monarchy. In Roman law the concept of individual liberty is not defined (as it generally is in modern political theory) in terms of the absence of constraint on action; it is defined by contrast with the condition of slavery, which is viewed in turn as a condition in which someone lives subject to the will of someone else. John Milton is shown to have made use of exactly this analysis of freedom and unfreedom in the tracts he published between 1649 and 1651 in defense of the regicide and the English commonwealth. A new explication is thus offered of the sources as well as the character of Milton's vision of individual liberty.